August 25, 2015

Wild Monday

I'd like to start this off by emphasizing the current situation in US equity markets. Putting it in perspective we have been on a historic bull run since the March lows of 2009. Nothing compares historically to the 1982 to 2000 run but this has been up there. Lately the market has been going straight up. These kinds of corrections in bull markets are good because it keeps the pace slow and steady and avoids a bubble crash. Let's face it valuations have been getting a little ahead of themselves on US companies. Netflix NFLX was trading at a price to earnings multiple P/E of 200. Other big tech companies like Amazon AMZN, Apple AAPL were getting expensive to. Geez, not even mentioning Tesla Motors, GoPro, Alibaba etc etc. These are all falling. They are right to fall.

The media gets over-dramatic about other economies. The US economy has been doing pretty well considering the rest of the world. Don't quote me verbatim but roughly a 1% change in GDP in Europe only effects US GDP 1/4%. It is a global economy now but I'm not convinced the US is going to go into a deep recession because of China or any other Region. There may well be a recession. I don't think it would be a bad thing. Recessions are a healthy part of economic growth. Greenspan did everything he could to prevent them and look at the bubble it created. Bernanke to. Slow and steady is good.

I just did a post on my trading blog Dynamitestocks.com about some of the things that went on early Monday morning during the US session. I don't know if all of the media is reporting it but we did in fact trigger circuit breakers within 30 minutes of the open. Circuit Breakers are "safe-guards" the stock exchanges put in place to stop a crashing market. A drop of 7% on the Dow Jones or S&P 500 index triggers a level one circuit breaker and the market is halted for 15 minutes. We reached that 7% threshold on the S&P just minutes after the open.